Espacio Urbano

ESL  and  English  Test  Selection  and  Implementation  

In this section, we review how placement tests were selected at the 10 subset colleges, the involvement of staff and faculty in this process, and the levels of confidence faculty had in both alignment of tests with curricula and the ability of placements tests to place US-LM students appropriately.

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_{One college used a directed self-placement process for ESL, described in more detail in the following}

Colleges varied in the extent to which English and ESL faculty were involved in the

selection or development of testing instruments8_{. At one end of the spectrum, the locally}

developed ESL test at one college was developed by ESL faculty members themselves. On the other end, faculty at nearly half of colleges we studied complained that they had little or no involvement in the selection of testing instruments or in the placement process. At two colleges, faculty reported that the English department lost its role in the placement process when the college made the decision to stop using writing samples. Several faculty and staff members we spoke to were not deeply knowledgeable about the assessment and placement process at their colleges. At one college, neither an administrator who oversaw matriculation nor the

matriculation director understood which tests in the ACCUPLACER battery were used, how the tests branched students between ESL and regular English placement tests, or how multiple measures embedded in the tests were calculated into students’ final placement levels.

At one college that had recently adopted ACCUPLACER, ESL faculty members voiced discontent with the college’s decision to discontinue a locally developed writing test and adopt a computerized test; in the words of one instructor, “Frankly, it was kind of pushed down our throats by counselors.” While faculty were not pleased with the adoption of a computerized test, the matriculation coordinator said the college had “taken a tremendous leap from the dark ages of the paper and pencil” and another administrator described problems in the past with

inconsistency in student placement. At another college, faculty were involved in the decision to choose COMPASS over ACCUPLACER. Although faculty at this college decided that COMPASS was the “lesser of two evils,” they were not optimistic about the choice. Despite this lack of confidence in COMPASS, faculty at this college agreed that it had done a good job in placing students, and they were now satisfied with using that instrument.

Faculty members at half the colleges we studied described their lack of confidence in their college’s placement tests. One tenured English instructor pointed out that she and an English department colleague each took the ACCUPLACER themselves to learn more about the test. She said that she herself scored one level below college English, and her colleague scored two levels below. However, although she found the test difficult and stressful, she said it was “rare” to see a student in her classes who was “not supposed to be there,” because “there’s always room for working and editing and so on.” This support for placing US-LM students into low-level English courses in order to perfect grammar and writing skills was evident in many interviews across colleges.

Other than at the college that had developed its own ESL test to align with its

curriculum, few faculty members we spoke with believed that their own college’s ESL or English placement tests were well aligned with their ESL and English curricula. At half of the colleges, faculty complained about the lack of a writing sample, with several faculty members questioning how students can be appropriately placed in a writing course without a writing sample. One English instructor explained, “the student I’m looking at is a very good writer, but the test isn’t going to capture that because the test is concerned with vocabulary and grammar questions . . . a lot of students don’t know how to answer grammar questions in isolat[ion].”

Concerns regarding how students who have lacked formal grammar instruction in English perform on placement tests are particularly relevant to US-LM students, who may be able to engage in many productive tasks in English, but who perform poorly on a tests that

8 _{The selection of testing instruments by individual colleges, along with the development of their own}

focuses on their discrete grammatical skills (see What’s in a Test?, Llosa & Bunch, 2011). An ESL instructor at one college argued that, instead of the current placement tests, it would be more useful to have a diagnostic for US-LM students that would “assess the skills and strategies [students] bring to the class, or [use] some sort of academic language or vocabulary index test that I can use to kind of gauge where the academic language ability is.”

In the one college that used directed self-placement for ESL, there was disagreement between ESL faculty and matriculation officials over its use. Directed self-placement at this college was a process whereby students attended ESL information sessions led by bilingual

assessment staff. 9 _{At the information sessions, students were provided with examples of written}

materials from various ESL levels, topics and skills covered in the different levels of ESL, a 45- minute general orientation to college, and assistance in enrollment for the students’ chosen course. Although the matriculation officials supported self-placement and pointed to

institutional research showing that it did a superior job of placing students correctly compared with the previous ESL placement test, ESL and English faculty were critical of the practice. One English instructor believed students prefer to take a test that will inform them which class to take, and she asserted that students’ self-esteem about their writing has too great an effect on their self-placement for it to be accurate.